Imagine having to work only four hours a day to produce all the high quality goods and services you need. Imagine beautiful, handmade products designed to last, not to be continually replaced and tossed away. Imagine a culture that celebrates art and community rather than material acquisition. Imagine solar power, community housing, ample public transportation, and no more commute hassles. Beyond Woodstock, more visionary than Star Trek, this is Ecotopia.
Ernest (Chick) Callenbach self-published Ecotopia in 1975 and its impact has since reached global proportions. Ecotopia has been translated into nine languages and sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. Former college professor, academic publisher, and environmental educator, Callenbach is the author of several titles, including Living Cheaply With Style and his latest book, Ecology: A Pocket Guide.
Joseph Petulla, teacher and counselor for almost 40 years, has written over a dozen books on philosophy, religion, and environmental studies. He is founder of the Master of Science in Environmental Management program at the University of San Francisco, now in its 20th year, which has created a whole generation of environmentally sensitive managers. This unique program allows Saturday students to work for private companies and public agencies conducting pertinent field research while earning degrees which enhance their career options. In melding academic, corporate, professional, and environmental interests, Joe's pioneering vision has set a high standard for environmental education, and his program has been emulated by other schools worldwide.
About myself: Joe was one of my professors at Berkeley in the 70s, and we have remained close friends over the years. I first read Chick's Ecotopia the year it was published and of course assumed that it was more than fiction—it was the blueprint for our collective future. And as publisher of OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, I have maintained an ongoing editorial commitment to environmental education. My wife and I log less than 3,000 miles annually in our old Toyota, but we own too many gadgets and still don't recycle enough.
We invite you to celebrate Earth Day on April 22 by driving less, cutting back on meat consumption (if not going totally vegetarian), recycling, and spending more time with friends and family instead of more mindless spending. Summarizing it in my favorite slogan: "Let's replace the culture of consumption with the consumption of culture."
A few years ago Time Magazine voted Earth "Planet of the Year," to which comedian Jay Leno commented, "What else would you expect—all the judges were from Earth!" When you think about it, Jay had a good point. This planet is our home, and we ought to be treating Mother a little nicer. Let's make every day Earth Day! From OPEN EXCHANGE MAGAZINE, March-April 1999.—Bart Brodsky, Publisher
Bart Brodsky: Why is there so much fundamental disagreement on environmental issues, at least as portrayed in the media? Let's take global warming? Is the earth getting warmer or not? Why can't we come to some kind of consensus?
Ernest Callenbach: Consider the source of this alleged disagreement. I don't think you'd find any significant disagreement among scientists about global warming. There are a couple of diehard holdouts who maintain, "No, no, it's not happening; it's an accidental artifact, normal variation in climate, blah, blah, blah." These holdouts were originally funded by industrial sponsors, so you can't really say there's a debate about global warming. There's a debate about what should be done about it, obviously, because some of the things that ought to be done are expensive.
Joseph Petulla: It doesn't even have to be the media itself. In the case of global warming, it's now widely understood that before the Kyoto meeting (United Nations conference on global warming) that the conglomerate of auto and oil companies got together and decided that they were going to avoid taking action. They decided they would find a couple of scientists—half a dozen out of about seven or eight hundred—who said that (global warming) is not certain. Of course, nothing is certain in the scientific community. But the evidence is overwhelming and it becomes more and more clear over time that global warming is going to be a big problem, and probably sooner rather than later. Anyway, they got these scientists and then they spread the word, using their money, that it really isn't a problem. It was very orchestrated, and in fact, the same corporations did the same thing with the first air pollution legislation in the 70s, and they were proved wrong then. Now there are a few companies who are a little bit more moderate, though not much.
BB: I get the impression that the government is not going to accept the reality of global warming until parts of Holland, Venice, and New York are under water from polar ice melts.
JP: It's not only that. It's a lot more serious in terms of disastrous weather —hurricanes— the kind of thing that's going on in Latin America. There's going to be much more violent kinds of weather. Over time it will change entire ecological habitats. Plants that can grow now won't be able to grow, and other plants will grow. Things are going to change around the globe, but we don't know exactly how yet.
BB: Overall, what is the state of ecology today? Are we further ahead or more behind in combating pollution since the 50s and 60s when the modern environmental movement was born?
EC: I would say very mixed. Nobody likes breathing terrible air, and we've had some success in preventing the air from getting worse. Water pollution in certain rivers and lakes is a little better than it was. The thing you have to remember here is that the press is owned—is a corporate press—and it is unlikely to make serious proposals for things that would inflict monetary pain on the corporate community.
JP: Yes. I remember back in the early 70s, after Earth Day, and throughout these kind of corporate counter-attacks, I was completely and utterly pessimistic that anything was ever going to be done. The powers that be were really aligned against the environmentalists. And then, little by little, people began to realize that things had to change. Finally there was that conjunction of Love Canal and Bhopal and Chernobyl within the first years of the 80s, where everybody rose up and the members of US Congress put their fingers in the air and said people really want us to act. A lot of good environmental legislation was passed in the early 80s. And let me give you a good example of progress. In public school systems everywhere in this country, in North America, undoubtedly, there are environmental curricula. There are environmental little books for little kids. And there's a kind of ethic now that there simply wasn't a generation ago. Now, what we have is wonderful, but it's not even close to what needs to be done. We're only 10% or 15% along the way.
EC: Joe set the parameters here for what's possible. You find certain corporations splitting off from the authoritative industry-wide consensus. We saw some of that happening about air pollution, and we see it happening now in the auto industry. The newest descendent of Henry Ford has decided that the wind is blowing away from SUV's (gas guzzling sport utility vehicles) and toward more responsibly designed vehicles. Such splits are normal in industrial life, and it's kind of funny that industry says "until we have certainty about global warming nothing should be done," because industry, let's face it, is a series of bets that you're going to make something that people will buy, that won't poison them, or they won't sue you too much, or whatever. So for them to hold the government to the standard of scientific certainty when corporate life, hour by hour and moment by moment, is a matter of risk calculation, is kind of offensive. But, you see corporations splitting off, as a couple of the smaller tobacco companies split off from the united front of the tobacco industry. And we will presumably see more corporations deciding that there's money to be made in doing greener things. This is very advanced in a place like Germany, where environmental consciousness is maybe 10, 15 years ahead of ours. So that constrains corporate people from doing certain kinds of bad things and entices them into doing certain kinds of good things. Both the stick and the carrot, I think, are necessary to get anywhere. But I agree with what Joe just said, that we are moving with agonizing slowness.
BB: Let me ask each of you, if you could wave a magic wand and create a sustainable global environmental culture, what would it look like? Chick, go ahead...
(laughs)
EC: Well, it's a little arrogant to say, but it would look very much like Ecotopia (from Callenbach's novel by the same name) as I described it 20 odd years ago. There are a few things that I would change. There probably would be alcohol driven cars as well as electric driven cars. There would still be no privately owned cars, though there would be shared vehicles of one kind or another. And I would add some things about global circulation. Ecotopia was, of course, an isolationist society, so I didn't have to think about the global pollution from Chernobyl and various other nastiness. But the attempt to envisage what a sustainable society would really be like is an exercise that we should all be doing. For every region of the world it would be different. It would be different in Florida than it would be in New England, and different there than it would be in the Great Plains. I wrote the book Bring Back the Buffalo, which was an attempt to apply Ecotopian logic, sustainablity logic, to a very little thought about area of this country, namely the Great Plain. There wind power and grass power through buffalo would give them the chance to have a stable, sustainable future as far as we can see ahead. Every part of the world ought to start thinking like this. And it's not that hard, you know—well, it's hard in the sense that there are not many people that have this set of mind. But we have the data and the political savvy. We can easily invent a society that would be much better than what we have now. The problem is how to get there.
BB: Joe, do you have anything to add to that vision? A sustainable Berkeley, for example?
JP: That's the thing, you know. It's much more applicable to think about sustainable society in small areas, in habitat areas or different geographic climate areas, as Chick's Ecotopia was, because there you have a chance to not take out of nature more than nature can give back. Here it's thinkable, because you have the possibility of nature replenishing itself, and people understanding it because they're close to it. But that isn't the way the world is. Now, if we think about the world, we have to think about television. I have this image of the peasants of Viet Nam or Thailand watching television using power that is from their car batteries because they don't have electricity. Every night they're sitting outside on the ground watching American TV. What television does is universalize desire. They see all of these things which they don't have, and as soon as an American company comes anywhere near, they go there and work as slave labor, hoping that they can buy those same creature comforts that have been ruining the whole world environment now for 150 years. And in order to get this they have to cut down their forests and deplete the fish from the sea. There's soil erosion from corporate agriculture, and pesticide poisoning, and worse.
Everyone understands that small is beautiful, that we can pull off an environmentally sound future if we think local. My question is: How is that possible? In this country, the people aren't letting up at all. They're buying more and more, spreading more freeways everywhere, and putting the end to nature in our country.
BB: Chick, when we were talking in 1994 you said that you drove an old 1977 Honda Civic, "the least car that money could buy," and that you hoped to keep it for at least another ten years. How's the car doing?
EC: Well, I kept it until a couple years ago, and then I gave it to my nephew.
BB: So, it's still going?
EC: It's still going somewhere! (all laugh)
BB: You said you drove it as little as possible and that your next car would be electric. Did that happen?
EC: No, it didn't happen. If I have to buy another car...
BB: You don't have one at all?
EC: My wife has a car, and the total mileage I drive myself is probably around two or three thousand a year. It's possible to live a very nice life without driving very much. And this raises a general question: How are we going to save the world? We're not going to save the world by beating on people and making them feel guilty and ashamed. We're going to save the world—if we do, and I'm not going to bet on it—by making it clear that living better is the aim and not amassing goods. Now, how do you live better? It's not necessarily driving more miles. It's not necessarily eating richer food. It's not necessarily doing a lot of things that we consider make up the standard of living. This is what all religions have been telling us since time immemorial about living well: You are happy when you have good relations with your family, with your community, and when you have what the Buddhists call "right livelihood," work that makes some sense in itself and is not just a paycheck. As long as we're obsessed with "work, work, work; buy, buy, buy," we're not making any progress toward getting happier. In this context driving a clunky old car is a sign of virtue.
BB: I knew we were going to work in guilt somewhere. Chick, tell us now about your latest book.
EC: It's called Ecology: A Pocket Guide, published by the University of California press, and I call it what every Ecotopian (and we're all Ecotopians!) ought to know about ecology. It's an attempt to explain to non-technical readers how ecologists think, what the logic of ecology is. We read in newspapers and magazines about current ecological issues one at a time without thinking systematically about why these things are problems and what we might do about them. We sort of miss the ecological forest by looking only at individual trees.
BB: It's a beautifully organized book! It's got wonderful, brief definitions of key environmental phrases, long enough to give readers a sense of context, but short enough so that the book can be read one paragraph at a time. It's an ideal book for anybody, high school on up.
EC: I hope it will prove so. It's also a book for non-book readers, because it's organized A through Z. You can start in the middle and read forwards, backwards, hop around using the cross-references that are included in each entry. As one editor told me, "I hope you won't mind, but your book is ideal bathroom reading." (all laugh)
BB: One of the first things I did was look up "population." I saw that you gave an estimate of "one billion" people for a sustainable technolgical culture (our current worldwide population is 6 billion). Then I saw a cross-reference to "deep ecology," and I looked that up. That's a word that's been defined at least eighteen different ways, yet you handled it simply and with elegance. So I was able to get some really good insights into not only how you defined these terms but also the way the words were used in wider context among environmentalists.
EC: I was trying to hew to the main line here. It's all very respectable scientifically. My main guru in it was Lynn Margulis, the co-inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis, so it pays proper attention to microbial life, which most books on ecology skimp on if they mention it at all. And it talks about global circulation patterns, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on, in ways that most ecology books don't. We need to be sensitized to the rest of these living beings which we depend on, even if they're not visible, and that's hard for people to do. We're big animals, and we're used to dealing with big plants and other big animals....